“Domestic or Personal Liberty” 1642–1645parliament’s. They too have suffered from “the experience of your owne
uprightnesse mis-interpreted” (225). Their political and ecclesiastical reforms
cannot succeed without reforming marriage and divorce, on which depends “not
only the spiritfull and orderly life of our grown men, but the willing and carefull
education of our children” (229–30). And their justifications for dissolving the
people’s covenant of allegiance when a ruler’s tyranny subverts its fundamental
purposes apply equally to his argument about dissolving a marriage covenant
whose ends are not met:
He who marries, intends as little to conspire his own ruine, as he that swears Alle-
giance: and as a whole people is in proportion to an ill Government, so is one man to
an ill mariage. If they against any authority, Covnant, or Statute, may by the soveraign
edict of charity, save not only their lives, but honest liberties from unworthy bondage,
as well may he against any private Covnant, which hee never enter’d to his mischief,
redeem himself from unsupportable disturbances to honest peace, and just content-
ment.... For no effect of tyranny can sit more heavy on the Common-wealth, then
this houshold unhappines on the family. (229)This epistle also challenges the Westminster Assembly to support his divorce re-
forms and so become the true Defenders of the Faith they claim to be, by becoming
Defenders of Charity: “Who so preferrs either Matrimony, or other Ordinance
before the good of man and the plain exigence of Charity, let him professe Papist,
or Protestant, or what he will, he is no better than a Pharise, and understands not
the Gospel” (233).
The most important change foregrounds the Mosaic law of divorce (Deuter-
onomy 24:1), that “pure and solid Law of God,” as the linchpin of the entire
argument (351). A new, long passage in chapter 1 insists on its enduring applicabil-
ity to Christians, and begins to define the term “uncleanness” as “any reall nakednes:
which by all the learned interpreters is refer’d to the mind, as well as to the body”
(243–4). Christ’s prohibition, he concludes, pertained only to lesser matters than
the “uncleanness” for which Moses permitted divorce, “those natural and per-
petual hindrances of society [which]... annihilate the bands of mariage more then
adultery.”^63 The authorities he cites indicate that between the first and second
editions of this tract, Milton studied much more intensively the Hebrew Bible and
its Hebraist commentators: “the Rabbins,” Maimonides (“famous above the rest”),
Grotius, and Paulus Fagius.^64 He singles out especially the most famous English
Hebraist, the “learned Selden” whose Law of Nature & of Nations he recommends as
a supplement to his own tract, for the evidence it marshals that to refuse divorce is
against the Law of Nature and of “God himself, lawgiving in person to his sancti-
fied people.”^65
Some added passages indicate developments in Milton’s thought. One such is his
remarkable portrait of a rational God, so very different from the Calvinist arbitrary
deity whose reasons and will are unfathomable: